Thin clients & Terminal Services configuration

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Shockey

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Hi all,

We are considering thin clients for a customer of roughly 30 systems. We will be using Terminal Services. I just have a few question about hardware requirement and best setup to go with.

What recommended ram for thin clients? 512 enough or should i look into 1GB?

Task they preform are very basic. Microsoft Office, Remote Desktop Protocol(ADP app), Internet explorer web based apps, Java based application. a few other programs. Nothing intensive.

For the server backend. I plan on using Server 08 as primary terminal server then the one server that acting as DC there as backup terminal server.

A few question

What type of disk should i get for this? SATA disk in a raid 5/6 enough speed for roughly 25 concurrent connections?

Should i use a seperate box for storage, or should i just stick with File replication between the two?

Thanks in advance
 
We're about to decommission the last of our old Dell PowerEdge 2800 series servers. They are all running 2003 Server, have 4GB of RAM, 3 x 36GB SCSI's in RAID5 and 2 x Dual Core Xeons. These are from 2004~ and kept us running up until now. We've been overloading them lately, when you get up to 5GB of RAM on a system with 3.5 usable, it's time to upgrade. However that's with 30 or so users on the boxes. Just to give you an idea of server spec's. You can easily get it done on a modern system with a decent CPU, plenty of RAM and some Enterprise SATA's. We use a mix of web and office apps, Office 2010, Spark, Internet Explorer style stuff. RAID5 or 6 would probably be fine, you could always go 10K SAS.

Our thin clients are DevonIT units connecting via RDP only. They have 128MB of RAM and do just fine for basic RDP. You really don't need more than that unless you plan on doing a bunch of crazy stuff like RemoteFX. Of course that's going to be more expensive all around, with the cost of thin clients going up for that feature, not to mention a workstation GPU for the server.
 
With Thin clients the system RAM isn't as important as the video RAM. 512 should be more than enough for that use(they will just be running the RDP client). Look for something with at least 64MB for the user experience to be be acceptable.

Make sure to check into the full licensing ramifications as well.
 
Yeah, RD CAL's are like $70-$80 a pop, and figure out if User or Device CAL's make more sense vs. each other. i.e. if you have 30 users that share 20 devices, device CAL's might be ideal. But if you have 30 users that roam around on 50 devices, you get the idea. If it's one for one, all things being equal, user CAL's are easy enough.
 
Thanks for help guys. The hard drive choice was my main concern.

Choice for CPU was a quad core 5600 intel series... 8-12GB of ram enough?

How do drivers work for printer attached to the Thin clients?

I'm concered about drivers being availible if i go with Wyse Thin OS or windows embedded/CE. What has the best support for drivers?

What my best choice for Operating system with driver support?


Plan to just launch a browser and present the terminal server remote applcation thought the browser..
 
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We only use network printers, so that's the extent of my helping on this one unfortunately. :(

You could always just buy usb/ethernet print servers and avoid that problem entirely. :)

Not sure if that's an option though, especially if a bunch of users have printers. We found that sharing laser printers per department was much cheaper in the long run than buying ink for individual printers. To the tune of several thousand dollars per month across our four sites.
 
MikeTrike said:
We only use network printers, so that's the extent of my helping on this one unfortunately. :(

You could always just buy usb/ethernet print servers and avoid that problem entirely. :)

Not sure if that's an option though, especially if a bunch of users have printers. We found that sharing laser printers per department was much cheaper in the long run than buying ink for individual printers. To the tune of several thousand dollars per month across our four sites.
Click to expand...

We have laser printer tied to the DC and shared out...

The printer I'm concered with are old ass ADP form printer attached to the computers with paralle and console cables..... handful or so of them. :p
 
We use network attached devices as much as possible in our RDP environment. This has seemed to work great.
 
Shockey said:
We have laser printer tied to the DC and shared out...

The printer I'm concered with are old ass ADP form printer attached to the computers with paralle and console cables..... handful or so of them. :p
Click to expand...

There's always parallel print servers. You should pick one up and do some testing. :D


There are many newer and cheaper models, however I've always had good compatibility with older HP Direct Jet print servers. We're also 100% laser now, it's been a process... Well I take that back, I just moved over our checks to laser, we still have one greenbar line printer that we'll keep until the paper runs out. We still have a few dozen boxes left, the old school general managers like their reports on it because it's ledger sized paper compared to 8.5"x11" on the laser.

Also on your terminal server setup, if 64-bit is not an option with say Server 08 R2 due to app compatibility. You can always use Server 2008 and run 32-bit with PAE enabled so you can run up to 64GB of usable RAM. I was pretty close to considering that before we said F-it and went VDI. :D You're going to need an Enterprise license though. Which are in the $2,000+ range...
 
In our enviornment, we have a few old Epson receipt printers in use. We are also using the EVGA version of the Wyse boxes. I ended up having to just put all of those on some DLink print server boxes I was lucky enough to find from another department that had discarded them when they went to a central laser printer. I then just installed the driver on the terminal server and set each one up. I originally had them direct attached to the EVGA boxes with a LPT to USB cable but kept having bad issues with that.
 
MikeTrike said:
There's always parallel print servers. You should pick one up and do some testing. :D


There are many newer and cheaper models, however I've always had good compatibility with older HP Direct Jet print servers. We're also 100% laser now, it's been a process... Well I take that back, I just moved over our checks to laser, we still have one greenbar line printer that we'll keep until the paper runs out. We still have a few dozen boxes left, the old school general managers like their reports on it because it's ledger sized paper compared to 8.5"x11" on the laser.

Also on your terminal server setup, if 64-bit is not an option with say Server 08 R2 due to app compatibility. You can always use Server 2008 and run 32-bit with PAE enabled so you can run up to 64GB of usable RAM. I was pretty close to considering that before we said F-it and went VDI. :D You're going to need an Enterprise license though. Which are in the $2,000+ range...
Click to expand...

These form printer also have com ports coming from them and plugged into current desktop. Not sure exactly what we are going to do. We do have some newer lenovo systems we plan on leaving in place. Thinking we just swap those around to where we need the old printers at and call it a day. Later down the road possible setup print server. Only office stations that have them so.

We decided to go with Wyse as our thin client choice due to price and also they are willing to send us a open box unit to test out and try before buying. Also various other reasons.

One thing we are unsure of right now, can't seem to find any documentation is how imaging works on the thin client with the Wyse operating system and the Wyse device management software. I have 3 different department and i don't want department 1 having access to department 2 applications. Are you able to use multiple images or is it one fits all?

Am i going about this the correct way?
 
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